The aim of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET is to draw protesters to New York's financial district in a non-violent protest to spark a mass movement against corporate dominance. While the corporate media ignores the protest, Reader Supported News will continue to report on the latest developments.

A demonstrator holds a sign during an Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan. The protests moved into their third week on Monday. (photo: Reuters)

The octopus, said activist Mark Lipman of Los Angeles, represents Wall Street's stranglehold on political, cultural and social life, with tentacles "that reach into your pocket to get your money and a tentacle to get your house."

"This is the real Rose Parade, and the other is the Rose Charade," said Pete Thottam, 40, an Occupy activist.

Protesters will march the parade route after the floats and marching bands have passed. The group has been working with Pasadena police and Tournament of Roses officials on how not to disrupt the parade.

On Thursday night - after protesters lined up for free food provided with donations to the movement - occupiers gathered for a performance and civil rights panel that attracted perhaps 70 occupiers. (A small occupy tent city has been set up a few blocks away, though protesters spent $1,000 to rent the indoor space for the week.) About five hours earlier, 12 occupiers had been arrested at the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters after they refused to move out from in front of the front door of the building, including a 14-year-old who was released into the custody of her father.

The occupiers don't see much distinction between the Democratic and Republican parties, though the fact that President Obama is effectively unopposed for reelection gives them little in the way of targets on the Democratic side. Emily Allison of Des Moines, who was among those arrested Thursday, said she felt "betrayed" by Mr. Obama for his unwillingness to veto the National Defense Authorization Act and for not closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.

The subpoena also includes a request for confidentiality from the Special Prosecutions Unit, but had no actual legal gag order. Without legal orders, the request for confidentially had no more enforceability than if Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Goldberger had also asked Twitter to send him a cupcake.

It's Twitter's policy to forward a subpoena to its target in order to give the user a chance to fight it, unless the company is specifically gagged. It appears that @p0isan0n received a copy from Twitter and posted it to Scribd.

ACLU attorney Peter Krupp, who is representing user @p0isan0n, filed a motion to quash the subpoena on First Amendment grounds. But Thursday, the ACLU seemed to be dealt a defeat when Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol Ball issued an impoundment order after hearing the case mainly in chambers.

Democrats were the target Thursday afternoon of Occupy the Caucuses demonstrators who attempted to highlight the role of corporate cash in politics by taping dollar bills over their mouths.

Protesters blocked three entrances to Iowa Democratic Party headquarters in Des Moines. Twelve people were arrested after they refused to leave. Earlier Thursday, five Occupy the Caucuses demonstrators were arrested at Ron Paul’s offices in Ankeny.

Thursday marked the second day of protests by members of Occupy the Caucuses. Protests are expected to continue today, four days before the Iowa caucuses, with events at various campaign offices of Republican presidential candidates, organizers said.

Demonstrators said they believe their arrests highlight and add urgency to their message. Tactics of civil disobedience, they say, have been used in all of the nation’s successful social movements.

Occupy activists kicked off their first day of direct actions in the week leading up to Iowa's January 3 caucuses with a protest outside Mitt Romney's Des Moines headquarters, where seven protesters were arrested on criminal trespassing charges on Wednesday. About 70 others chanted familiar occupy slogans and protested Romney's ties to Wells Fargo. (Employees and executives of the San Francisco-based banking giant have given $61,500 to Romney thus far in the 2012 election cycle.)

Before the protest, several dozen occupy activists met at their own headquarters near the State Capitol, where they decided to protest outside Romney's campaign office because of its vicinity to a Wells Fargo just a few doors down the same street. The occupiers were joined by about a half-dozen police officers from the Des Moines area, who were invited in the interest of open communication.

As police arrested the seven protesters who refused to move to the sidewalk during the Romney protest, Des Moines Sergeant Chris Scott told reporters, "Up to this point, we've had an excellent relationship with the Occupy Des Moines folk. If there's any concerns they call us, and vice versa." He said that police have also been in regular contact with presidential campaign offices in the city.

CAMBRIDGE – Early last month, a group of students staged a walkout in Harvard’s popular introductory economics course, Economics 10, taught by my colleague Greg Mankiw. Their complaint: the course propagates conservative ideology in the guise of economic science and helps perpetuate social inequality.

The students were part of a growing chorus of protest against modern economics as it is taught in the world’s leading academic institutions. Economics has always had its critics, of course, but the financial crisis and its aftermath have given them fresh ammunition, seeming to validate long-standing charges against the profession’s unrealistic assumptions, reification of markets, and disregard for social concerns.

Mankiw, for his part, found the protesting students “poorly informed.” Economics does not have an ideology, he retorted. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, he pointed out that economics is a method that helps people to think straight and reach the correct answers, with no foreordained policy conclusions.

In a dizzying series of reversals, Ms. Quan initially embraced the protest, then ordered the camp cleared, then allowed the demonstrators to return after the police seriously injured one of them, a Marine veteran. Two weeks later, she ordered the plaza cleared again, citing reports that “anarchists” were fomenting violence.

Now, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza remains empty most days, but Ms. Quan’s mayoralty is teetering. In a city known for its flamboyant and colorful mayors, she has emerged as one of its most controversial. Conservatives accuse her of coddling the protesters, while former allies on the left are incensed that she ordered the plaza cleared at all.

And now two rival groups, one started by a black community activist, the other by a white former mayoral candidate, are vying to have her recalled.

Twitter has been subpoenaed for information related to Occupy supporters' accounts, proving that law enforcement agencies have been monitoring OWS supporters' activity on social media. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts is fed up with being mocked, ridiculed, and criticized by faceless Tweeters, so it's taking matters into its own hands.

Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Benjamin A. Goldberger sent a subpoena on Dec. 14 to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco requesting information on a number of accounts and hashtags associated with the Occupy Boston protest movement to assist authorities with an "official criminal investigation."

After receiving the subpoena, Twitter released it to a user listed in the subpoena per company policy, despite the fact that the D.A.'s office requested that "in order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the ongoing criminal investigation, this office asks that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber."

“The state and city pretty much shut us down at the historic ‘public square’ at the Capitol,” said Roger Ehrlich, an Occupy Raleigh activist, “so it seemed reasonable to assemble at the modern, corporatized version – the mall.” Ehrlich and I were among six people arrested on Black Friday during an Occupy Raleigh protest at the Crabtree Valley Mall.

The Occupy tent occupations provided a public forum for democratic protest and created a space for envisioning new communities. Then, police began to crack-down on encampments, disinformation campaigns grew and public support waned. As a result, many Occupy movements have expanded tactics from long-term public occupations to short-term direct actions on private property, such as ports, banks, homes, and malls. What are the implications of this shift to the power hubs of the 1%?

First, this transition from the public to the private directly exposes the collusion between government and corporations.

As a resident of Oakland and a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley, I had survived the police brutality in the public spaces of Occupy Oakland and Occupy Cal. Yet I ended up being arrested on private property by a planned coordination between mall cops and the city police.

It’s always been about the money. Occupy Wall Street chose to set up its 24-hour outpost of political dissent on the doorstep of the finance industry primarily to underscore the simple fact that money has corrupted our political process so completely that the seat of power in the U.S. isn’t even in Washington, D.C. any more. That said, the Capitol continues collecting its cut, as evidenced in this week’s double-barreled dispatches, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, on the exploding wealth gap between our ever-more affluent representatives in Congress and the financially flat-lined citizens they represent.

From its inception, OWS has focused on the concept of legalized bribery, as the continually rising cost of a political campaign—an average of $1.4 million for a successful House run, up fourfold in real dollars since 1976, and nearly $10 million for a Senate seat—has been largely subsidized by wealthy donors, corporations and special interests, in return for legislation that favors their interests. It’s a form of regulatory capture that most first-world democracies outlaw as corruption, but that Americans know as “the way things are,” along with “ask your doctor” pharmaceutical ads and campaigns pitching products directly to young children. The result is an almost total lack of confidence in our elected officials, as reflected by Congress’ almost impossibly low 9 percent approval rating.

Even insider-trading laws don’t apply to our lawmakers, despite their regular access to valuable market information Joe Citizen will never hear, not to mention their power to tilt markets and pick winners and losers by removing a sentence from this piece of legislation, or adding a clause to that one.

OAKLAND -- A new Occupy Oakland encampment sprang up in West Oakland on Tuesday and already there are more than a dozen tents.

The new camp is located in a vacant lot on the 2000 block of Peralta Street near Mandela Parkway and is being called the Cypress Triangle, according to the Occupy California website.

Oakland has been without an Occupy encampment for more than a five weeks. The last camp, also in West Oakland, was cleared out by police late Nov. 22. Protesters had taken over a vacant lot at 18th and Linden streets a day earlier but left when police directed them to clear out.

It’s always been about the money. Occupy Wall Street chose to set up its 24-hour outpost of political dissent on the doorstep of the finance industry primarily to underscore the simple fact that money has corrupted our political process so completely that the seat of power in the U.S. isn’t even in Washington, D.C. any more. That said, the Capitol continues collecting its cut, as evidenced in this week’s double-barreled dispatches, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, on the exploding wealth gap between our ever-more affluent representatives in Congress and the financially flat-lined citizens they represent.

(Reuters) - Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous group said they are getting ready to publish emails stolen from private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting Inc, whose clients include the U.S. military, Wall Street banks and other corporations.

Strategic Forecasting Inc, which is also known as Stratfor, disclosed over the weekend that its website had been hacked and that some information about its corporate subscribers had been made public.

The hacking group known as Antisec has claimed responsibility for the attack and promised to cause "mayhem" by releasing stolen documents.

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.

They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.

The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.

Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson.

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” he said.

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program "Up w/ Chris Hayes."

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC's clients, the American Bankers Association.

On a recent trip I took to the countryside north of Barcelona I stared out the window of our economy car and wondered at the quantity of chabolas (shanty towns) that had sprung up on the hillsides along the AP-7 highway. Had there always been so many? Or was it just that I was noticing more of them now that autumn had swept summer's foliage from the trees? There they were, spouting smoke from makeshift stacks, pathetic hovels consisting of scavenged slabs of metal, old boards, tires, tarps. It was a stormy day, and I imagined pools of rainwater collecting in and around these homes.

Everyone needs a place to stay, but paying rent in Barcelona is hard for a lot of Spaniards due to the economic crisis and country's 20 percent unemployment rate. It's hard to pay down a mortgage if you're suddenly out of work, a situation some Americans know all too well these days. The difference is that in Spain when homeowners can’t make their payments, the bank takes the house and the once-owner keeps all the debt. The unlucky individual is rendered jobless, homeless, and a good €200,000 in the hole. Many see this deal as abusive, and organizations like Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) protest and have managed to stop more than 100 evictions since 2010. Still, about 300 families a day lose their homes across the country.

While PAH takes to the streets in protest, Okupas take to the many empty buildings. "These days with the housing crisis they estimate that there are 80,000 apartments standing empty in Barcelona," says Iñaki García García of El Local, an alternative bookshop in El Raval connected to the Okupa movement. While Okupas move into buildings for many reasons, bringing awareness to the Spanish constitutional right to housing is a big one.

By the time the Occupy movement came to New Haven in October, New York City police had already made headlines when a video of a high-ranking cop pepper-spraying female protesters went viral. This was on the mind of Officer David Hartman, the press spokesman for the New Haven Police Department. Every time a redneck cop cracks some skulls, he said, cops everywhere become the bad guys. So when more than a thousand people gathered on the city's historic Green to launch Occupy New Haven, Hartman was bracing himself for the worst.

"But it never happened," he said. He recalls a moment when he saw "a little old lady with white hair" chanting with the crowd. In response to the call of "We are the 99 percent," the woman turned to face him. She screamed: "And so are the cops!" Hartman, who agreed with her, could only smile.

"The smiles continued that day, and I thought to myself, 'This is going to be an easy gig.'" The physical occupation in New Haven has flourished as its counterparts nationwide have been stymied or crushed.

NEW YORK (AP) — Occupy Wall Street may still be working to shake the notion it represents a passing outburst of rage, but some establishment institutions have already decided the movement's artifacts are worthy of historic preservation.

More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement.

Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera.

The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month.

NEW YORK - December 23 - A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world. The conference is held each spring in New York City. The following speakers have just been announced for the 2012 conference:

Earlier this month, tens of thousands of Russians marched in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and several other cities decrying the recent parliamentary election results. In the largest series of protests since the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago people have united across political affiliations shouting, “We exist! We exist!”

The protests began December 4th - shortly after election results were released showing in some instances returns that totaled as high as 146% of the popular vote. Russians took to the streets, chanting, “Putin is a thief” and “Russia without Putin.” By the following Saturday, people turned out en masse (estimates range from 25,000-100,000) for a protest in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. It was accompanied by dozens of smaller rallies across Russia’s nine time zones.

During the election, ballot boxes were stuffed; monitors shooed away; voter registrations bought, sold, and forged; and teams of United Russia activists bussed from precinct to precinct to vote early and often, in a process called "The Carousel."

Richard Chartres, the third most senior cleric in the Church of England, delivered a large box of chocolates to protesters enjoying a Christmas dinner donated by well wishers.

He said the encampment, that is currently fighting eviction orders, should leave some kind of tribute to the anti-capitalist message the protesters have been trying to get across.

It has been suggested a tent could be erected in the church itself where people can come together to discuss a more fair way to distribute income from the banks and work with companies to improve corporate responsibility.

BEIJING — Thousands of residents of a southern Chinese village staging a rare revolt are calling on authorities to return the body of a local representative whose death in police custody helped sparked the rebellion.

The villagers, who have driven local authorities from the area, gathered at a square outside a local temple Saturday to shout slogans calling for the return of farmland they say has been sold to developers without their consent and to urge the central government to intervene, said resident Qin Zhuan, a woman contacted by phone.

Zuccotti Park, since renamed 'Liberty Park' by Occupy Wall St. demonstrators, has seen religious observances by all faiths. On the national holiday of the 2011 birthday of Jesus, some devout Christian anti-war activists will hold Christ Mass in the park from Midnight Christmas Eve through Christmas Day and Evening.

What is striking is that the 24 hour Christ Mass will call attention to great American disciples who acted upon Jesus' message of love and non-violence in opposing their government's and fellow Americans' wars upon small nations.

Large picture posters of Jesus will be flanked by photographs of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., both carrying quotations from each. A banner will honor the memory of Dorothy Day, founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement.

2011 was a revolutionary year for a new movement that is changing the world. From NYC to Cairo, we are just getting started. We are still busy building this amazing movement, and we couldn't do it without you -- our supporters! Let's make next year even better!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6dNVRJEUA

(This video was passed by consensus through the New York City General Assembly on Tuesday, December 20, 2011.)

As the year ends, American politics remains mired in the agenda of the right. The House is, at least momentarily, refusing to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits - two policies genuinely beneficial to the middle class. And the presidential campaign heading into the Iowa primaries is dominated by the libertarianism of Ron Paul and the astonishing, appalling ideas - eliminate child labor laws, for instance - of Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street changed the debate for a brief spell, and, yes, President Obama harkened back to the glory days of progressivism with his Kansas speech. But in general American politics has lost sight of the most important crisis of our generation: the shrinking middle class.

The Occupy the Rose Parade movement received its most notable endorsement Sunday, as social activist and noted academic Cornel West offered his support for the demonstration during a speech at All Saints Church.

"Any time you get a chance to bear witness for justice, I support that," West said. "If I was around Jan. 2, I would be part of it."

West's endorsement came as a surprise to Occupy the Rose Parade organizer Aaron Murphy, who was at All Saints for West's speech.

As a citizen of India, and as a citizen of the world we all inhabit, I offer one of Gandhi's most basic ideas to those Occupying Wall Street. India is the world's biggest democracy and the US is the world's most powerful democracy. I know the actions of the United States profoundly affect my country's future – but I also know the reverse is true.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was partly inspired by demonstrations in Cairo's Liberation Square – "March like an Egyptian!" was one of its slogans – and the peaceful demonstrators in Wall Street's Zucotti Park ate pizzas ordered on the web by supporters in Libya.

India gained independence without a war, something even the United States can't claim. This was largely due to Gandhi's understanding that the ends don't justify the means, the means are the ends; the means we choose dictate the ends we get. As this has come down to us, it is popularly understood as non-violence, but it went far deeper than that. After all, if actions are only against something, however unjust, the result will not satisfy people's need to see and taste and live and work for something that is just. Even if the negative effort wins, a new negative will replace it because a critical mass of people haven't learned to live in a positive way. Gandhi went so far as to say that civil disobedience is "worse than useless…without …constructive effort."

As I walk through lush Brownstone Brooklyn at night, I try to reconcile the stillness that pervades these streets with the urgency of Liberty Plaza. I wonder, did I lose touch with the beauty of the wet bluestone and wrought iron gates somewhere along the course of one of my many feverish runs to the 4/5 station to get to Wall Street?

I know that I’m young, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the quaking I feel is the strength of my own heartbeat or the earth moving under my feet. I wonder if it’s impossible at any age to have perspective from the midst of something that resembles a movement; I imagine the view from the middle of the General Assembly looks dramatically different than the one from a calmer, more static place.

Yet the quaking earth hypothesis is supported by the fact that perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Madison’s Capitol Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece. In Liberty Plaza, occupiers’ disaffection is part of a powerful surge of global discontent, a surge that is manifesting itself in the collective realization of bodies and voices as strategic tools for communication and collective action.

Computer hackers are avenging the Occupy movement by exposing the personal information of police officers who evicted protesters and threatening family-values advocates who led a boycott of an American Muslim television show.

In three Internet postings last week, hackers from the loose online coalition called Anonymous published the email and physical addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, salary details of thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country.

The hackers said they were retaliating for police violence during evictions of Occupy protest camps in cities around the country, but law enforcement advocates slammed the disclosures as dangerous.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

Occupy Pittsburgh is holding a public demonstration in front of the U.S. Steel Tower, 6th and Grant Street, at noon on Wednesday, December 21, 2011, to protest the bilking of millions of dollars from state and local governments and Pittsburgh schools.

The U.S. Steel Tower was sold early in 2011. The group led by New York real estate investor Mark Karasick, who purchased the building for a quarter billion dollars, is using a loophole to try to cheat tax payers out of $10 million in realty transfer taxes. Half ($5 million) would go to the City of Pittsburgh, a quarter ($2.5 million) to the state, and a quarter ($2.5 million) to Pittsburgh schools. Occupy Pittsburgh, along with local teachers, unions, students, and community leaders, demand that Mr. Karasick’s real estate group stop being a “Scrooge” and pay the transfer taxes. Pittsburgh faces a crumbling infrastructure and crushing school closings. The city needs to collect its dues for local improvements and to support our schools.

A unique pressure campaign has been playing out in Iowa, where the group Occupy Des Moines and other progressive groups briefly took over both the Obama for America and the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters, just as the media spotlight descends on the city two weeks before the caucuses.

Occupy Des Moines, in conjunction with Veterans for Peace and the community organization Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), blockaded the entrance to OFA headquarters in Des Moines on Saturday, forcing a closure of its office. They set up tents in front of the front door, and vowed not to move, calling it “the annex” to the main Occupy Des Moines camp a few blocks away at Stewart Square. Megan Felt, an organizer with Occupy Des Moines, declared victory on Saturday. “Our goal is to disrupt business as usual until the campaigns address our concerns, and the fact that Obama’s Iowa staff chose not to open up today is a victory for our movement because we prevented them from going about their normal Saturday routine.” At the height, the action involved around 120 protesters.

They decided to occupy the front door in shifts, disrupting the campaign’s work. And they came with a list of demands here.

The corporate steno pool media is anxious to write the obituary for the occupations around America. Early drafts of the predictable death notice are already appearing. Like the papers that supposedly* got their facts slightly wrong concerning Mark Twain’s demise, the media may be completely off the mark when it comes to the occupy movement circling the drain.

Given the media’s hunger for “colorful” stories, this rush to be done with Occupy might seem surprising. After all, we’re talking about news ghouls who would gleefully exhume Anna Nicole Smith’s body if they thought they could extract a few more cable news bites or column inches from her dessicated form. But somehow, for the media eulogizers, Occupy’s funeral can’t come soon enough. They are all taking a number to see who gets to act as pall-bearer.

We know better, though. Yes, Zuccotti park is shut down, Boston’s been evicted, Oakland hauled away. But Firedoglake’s own Occupy Supply is clothing protestors at nearly a hundred occupations large and small across the country. And they aren’t dying, they don’t even have the sniffles (not with those scarves anyway.) We know there are active occupations from Saint Augustine to San Diego and all the saintly places in between.

But overlooking that multiplicity of occupations all over the country isn’t the media’s only mistake. The other, possibly bigger, story they are missing are the less photo-op-worthy activities happening away from the tents and the sleeping bags.

The right-on-the-money initiative of occupations to turn their attention to home foreclosures is not just a great idea, but possibly a glimpse of what the movement will ultimately bring us.

It’s instructive to be in a city who’s occupation is under threat of eviction. Here in Pittsburgh, the camp has been served it’s notice to vacate from Bank of New York/Mellon “property.” Property in quotes because Mellon Green is mandated by a zoning requirement to be accessible public space. Occupy Pittsburgh’s legal team is fighting the eviction.

For those saying that Occupy Wall Street hasn't had a concrete effect, take a look at this. It's not much, but it's a little something. The leaders of the House Financial Services Committee announced yesterday that they will be holding hearings on the SEC's practice of concluding settlements with Wall Street defendants without forcing the accused to admit to wrongdoing.

This whole thing seems to be the creature of ranking Republican Spencer Bachus. From his site:

"The SEC's practice of using 'no-contest settlements' has raised concerns about accountability and transparency, and I'm pleased the Committee will examine these concerns in a bipartisan manner," said Chairman Bachus

Mic check! MIC CHECK! Let the Puppet show begin! LET THE PUPPET SHOW BEGIN!" The demonstrators who held the floor at a December 14 meeting at Newtown High School in Corona, Queens, were part of Occupy DOE (Department of Education), a mix of veteran teachers, parents and Occupy Wall Street activists that is bringing the language and tactics of OWS to the grassroots fight against neoliberal education reform.

The demonstrators explained why the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), which had convened the Queens meeting, is an illegitimate, undemocratic body. New York's PEP replaced elected school boards when Bloomberg established mayoral control of the school system. It is a parody of a school board: at its meetings, members of the public make impassioned speeches, but nothing they say makes any difference. The majority of the panel's members are appointed by the mayor, and the PEP has never, in all its existence, rejected any of his proposals.

As the official meeting began, each panelist was introduced. As each mayoral appointee said their name, Occupy DOE yelled, "Puppet!" Throughout the meeting, the protestors waved puppets to dramatize the nature of mayoral control.

The evening is rainy and quite warm, which is disconcerting since it is almost December. A hundred or so people gather on the east side of what we may safely call Zuccotti Park, for their General Assembly.

Nothing about the park feels like Liberty Plaza anymore. Every inch of the perimeter, for instance, is lined with metal barricades, just inside which stand private security guards, husky and rude, dressed in all black, apart from their yellow vests. A massive Christmas tree has been set up in the park and barricaded off. Besides the few protesters, that’s who’s here. The guards and their barricades. There's no kitchen, no library, no medical tent, no media center. There is no drum circle, no sign-painting station, no welcome table on Broadway, no altar around the meditation tree in the northwest corner. There are only about a hundred people, deliberating democratic minutiae, trying to get through a too-big agenda, packed with yesterday's unattended business.

This would be hard enough to do without the people who keep loudly interrupting the meeting. But every meeting I've recently attended - and from what I gather, every recent meeting I have not - has been brought to a grinding halt, the basic ability to debate and consent to proposals crippled by a determined few who will not to let things proceed until their issues are addressed. This is the reason for the backed-up business. The people shouting about their needs over the debate. It's clear that the primary issue afflicting Occupy right now is the lack of an occupation.

Wisconsin protesters have Walker in retreat on his unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech in the Capitol, as he does not instruct police to even enforce their newly amended form in the face of a would-be standoff.

We talked about all this in relation to Occupy Wall Street a whole lot at Netroots New York, and by the time I got back, Occupy Madison officially joined the "Solidarity Sing Along" in force, and today were handing out "official permits to protest" citing the US constitution.

It was during the fifth or sixth major argument within the netroots in 2011 about the Obama Administration that the first protestors attempted to Occupy Wall Street in mid-September. Within days the talk of primary challenges, donor strikes, and third parties had vanished as the eyes of the progressive movement turned toward NYC. As protestors across the country took up the cause and the practices of Occupy Wall Street, setting up tents in cities large and small and bringing the message of the 99% to the masses, many progressive activists and organizations stopped what they were doing and gravitated to the new movement springing up in the streets.

It is an inconvenient truth for mainstream and right-wing Christians that Jesus was crucified for taking his protest against income inequality to the power center of Jerusalem, where he challenged how money had perverted religious principles. Now, that tension is returning with the Occupy protests, Rev. Howard Bess says.

Around 2,000 protesters gathered in Duarte Square to mark the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, which was inspired by Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian merchant who lit himself on fire one year ago today. It was also the three-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

Most of the day was festive and peaceful, with artists and Occupiers celebrating the three-month anniversary. However, the celebration was not the only event planned by the protesters. Adjacent to the park is a fenced-off lot owned by Trinity Real Estate, the corporate arm of Trinity Episcopal Church.

Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement, there's a deeper understanding about the power that corporations wield over the great majority of us. It's not just in the financial sector, but in all facets of our lives. The disparity between the top 1 percent and everyone else has been laid bare - there's no more denying that those at the top get their share at the expense of the 99 percent. Lobbyists, loopholes, tax breaks... how can ordinary folks expect a fair shake?

No one knows this better than family farmers, whose struggle to make a living on the land has gotten far more difficult since corporations came to dominate our farm and food system. We saw signs of it when Farm Aid started in 1985, but corporate control of our food system has since exploded.

From seed to plate, our food system is now even more concentrated than our banking system. Most economic sectors have concentration ratios hovering around 40 percent, meaning that the top four firms in the industry control 40 percent of the market. Anything beyond this level is considered "highly concentrated," where experts believe competition is severely threatened and market abuses are likely to occur.

One year ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor protesting the confiscation of his wares, set himself ablaze - igniting an uprising of people around the world who were fed up with the inequality that the world economic system and oppressive governments have established.

Many credit Bouazizi with inspiring what was known as the Arab Spring. The movement he inspired did not end in the Middle East. The successful revolutions in Arab countries also inspired people's movements in Europe and recently the United States.

The Occupy movement in the United States credits the Arab Spring with showing that when people occupy a public space and demand change they can succeed.

Occupy Columbia protesters will continue their around-the-clock demonstrations on the State House lawn after a federal judge determined that state government does not have regulations in place to prevent camping and overnight stays.

And, now, state officials will be writing new rules to address the issue.

U.S. District Judge Cameron M. Currie said the State Budget and Control Board has the authority to create regulations to prohibit camping and sleeping. However, none exist, and policies regarding the use of the State House grounds have been inconsistently applied and were ever-changing for the Occupy Columbia protesters, Currie said.

State lawmakers grilled University of California officials Wednesday over the controversial pepper-spraying of student protesters at UC Davis, only to be warned by those administrators — however conciliatory — that more protests are inevitable if the Legislature keeps cutting funds for higher education.

The university administrators gave a legislative committee the same combination of apology and defense they have offered since the incident sparked nationwide outrage last month and became a rallying point for the Occupy movement.

UC President Mark G. Yudof said the university had launched an independent investigation of the Davis incident and formed a task force to review its use-of-force and demonstration policies at all 10 campuses.

When Sascha Meinrath saw the Occupy encampment in D.C., he saw something few others would — a testbed for technology.

Meinrath has been chasing a dream for more than a decade, ever since he was a liberal arts grad student in Urbana, Illinois: community wireless networks. From that small beginning, Meinrath now runs a State Department-funded initiative to create an Internet in a Suitcase — the Voice of America of the digital age.

It’s 3 a.m. on Nov. 30 in San Francisco. Riot cops just raided Occupy Philly and Occupy Los Angeles tonight and the live streams are running on my laptop. We are preparing for a possible raid of Occupy San Francisco tonight or tomorrow. I’m talking back and forth with other occupiers and labor, community and faith allies, deciding whether to call for a mass mobilization tonight and to prepare for mass civil disobedience.

On the same date twelve years earlier thousands of us got up before dawn to blockade and shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. As dusk fell the city declared a “state of emergency” in the downtown section of the city and drove people out with volleys of teargas and charges of riot cops. The next day, Dec. 1, thousands of us defied their martial law and took to the streets and hundreds were arrested and attacked. People stayed in the streets all week until Dec. 3, when the WTO talks collapsed as representatives from poor countries, bolstered by public rebellion in the streets and pressure from movements in their home countries, refused to buckle under. It feels like a similar moment now with political space and possibility breaking wide open — a time of public and global uprising — only bigger.

Journalist Carla Murphy had planned to cover a small protest in the Bronx last Saturday and then head to brunch - but she went to jail instead.

A week after New York City police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly ordered officers not to interfere with journalists covering the Occupy protests, I found myself sitting in a cage in a back room of the 40th Precinct in the Bronx staring at a travel-size white bottle of Razac Hand & Body Lotion. My workday had taken an improbable turn; I'd been arrested. So now here I was, fixating on a bottle of lotion, wondering why it was there, thinking of it as "free" because it sat on a ledge outside the black iron-mesh cage, and worse, imagining the many uses of lotion in a jail. Better to pass the time trying to accept my present circumstances than trying to figure out the absurd.

I'd been covering the Occupy movement beyond Wall Street, and the Bronx had so far held eight weekly general assemblies of its own. This past Saturday, there was a planned 11 a.m. rally to bring attention to the city's October bulldozing of the Morning Glory community garden, a long-abandoned lot that area residents had taken over two years ago for the garden. The lot was now grassy and fenced-in.

I thought that I'd report for an hour or so and then meet a friend for an afternoon brunch. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, however, I was in handcuffs.

When I stepped out of the 149th Street station at 11 a.m., my first time at that sprawling five-lane intersection, I found the protest site - a sidewalk beside an empty lot - easily because of a heavier-than-expected police presence. Early reports had indicated the opposite. I didn't expect to see an officer of rank surrounded by 11 cops, four cars and a police van. I remember thinking, There're more cops here than protesters.

"951 cities in 82 countries" has become the standard definition of the scale of the Occupy protests around the world this weekend, following on from the Occupy Wall Street and Madrid demonstrations that have shaped public debate in the past month.

We wanted to list exactly where protests have taken place as part of the Occupy movement - and see exactly what is happening where around the globe. With your help, adding events in our form below, we've been able to show 750 Occupy events world wide.

OAKLAND -- Despite calls to desist from Oakland politicians and union officials, Occupy protesters succeeded Monday night in shutting down operations at the Port of Oakland for the second time in less than two months.

The companies that operate the 26 berths at the nation's fifth-busiest container port told longshore workers not to report for the 7 p.m. evening shift - effectively halting work for the next eight hours and preventing 100 to 200 employees from earning the pay they would have received on a typical shift.

Occupy protests targeting ports in California spread up through the Pacific Northwest on Monday, shutting down two main shipping terminals at the Port of Portland before leading to a boisterous march on the Port of Seattle.

Portland's main container terminal, the largest and busiest shipping facility at the port, closed early in the day as about 200 protesters marched in at dawn, setting up a tent and portable toilets.

Demonstrators also shut down nearby Terminal 5, which handles grain and potash shipments. "We're going to see some lost hours, lost shifts -- people won't be able to work today because of this," Josh Thomas, spokesman for the port, told The Times.

Demonstrators linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement set up pickets from San Diego to Anchorage on Monday as part of a coordinated move to shut down ports across the West Coast. In Portland, they carried signs and shouted slogans near trucks waiting to enter the terminals, effectively blocking operations as many port workers refused to cross their lines.

It was never a genuine question. Money media prattled on about Occupy Wall Street’s supposedly ineffable demands the same way they batted aside the end capitalism signs to wonder what the Seattle protesters had on their minds. That said, the Occupy movement has always been more about doing than demanding and this week, OWS stepped it up another notch.

On December 6, OccupyYourHomes joined with local community organizers to take on the housing crisis. In twenty-five cities, protesters interrupted house auctions, blocked evictions and occupied foreclosed homes. In East New York they moved Alfredo Carrasquillo, Tasha Glasgow and their two children into a foreclosed home that had stood empty for three years. I attended the action Tuesday and couldn’t drag myself away. Even as the rain drizzled and the temperature sank, I watched the numbers of protesters grow and thought of the many, many members of underfunded community groups I’ve spoken to over the years. Among those, Community Voices Heard, New York Communities for Change, Picture the Homeless, Organize for Occupation, VOCAL-NY and Reclaim the Land. They talked on GRITtv about toxic loans and targeted neighborhoods, forced foreclosures, fear and the general lack of national interest.

12/12 PORT SHUTDOWN: Report from Los Angeles 7:53 PDT

By Dorothy Reik

12 December 11

Elderly people, people in wheelchairs and children being attacked. Batons are at the ready. Protestor leaders are telling the police they are peaceful. Terminal J. Police don't look like they want to be there. Protestors being kept from the protest. Helicopters overhead. CBS NOT covering. Some trucks are coming in from another driveway. Protestors moving to block them.

More police arriving. Arrests threatened. Tune in the 90.7 for coverage.

12/12 PORT SHUTDOWN: Report from Los Angeles

By Dorothy Reik

12 December 11

CBS is covering and will continue to cover. In Long Beach the truck parking lot at the Goldman Sachs dock is empty. By now it is usually full. More police are massing. Updates as I get them.

Lowes is defending its decision to pull advertising from the Muslim reality show so if you were planning to shop there please think again. They are responding to pressure from right wing Christian groups who don't want to see Muslims portrayed in a favorable light.

SEATTLE -- Occupy Seattle demonstrators planned a march and two rallies Monday as part of the campaign to shut down West Coast ports.

Organizers said on their website they would rally at 1 p.m. at Westlake Plaza in downtown Seattle then march to Port of Seattle property for rallies at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. near the Spokane Street bridge and under the West Seattle bridge.

The website says demonstrators do not plan to break into port property or to sabotage equipment, but organizers say they plan on blocking traffic into the Port of Seattle in solidarity with other West Coast movements. Occupy marches and rallies also are planned Monday in Tacoma, Olympia, Vancouver, B.C., and other port cities along the coast.

Protesters from Occupy L.A. and other groups plan to form a picket line at the Port of Long Beach on Monday to try to shut down traffic at at least one shipping terminal. Similar actions are planned at ports up and down the West Coast.

The target of the Long Beach protest is SSA Marine, a shipping company. Occupy L.A. demonstrator Michael Novick said protesters chose SSA Marine because "they embody all the ills of this economic regime we live under."

Protesters say SSA Marine has engaged in unfair labor practices and pursued objectionable environmental policies. Their other complaints include the company's role as a military contractor during the Iraq war and its connection to Goldman Sachs, an investor in SSA Marine.

NYC will Target the Vampire Squid- Goldman Sachs In solidarity with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th, the NYC Occupy Movement vows to disrupt business as usual for the those that exploit our nation's ports – and profit from the exploitation of tens of thousands of working people laboring behind the scenes ...of the international trade system.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street is descending upon a single Wall Street giant – the owner of half of one of the planet's largest transportation and shipping outfits – Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid who sucks the blood of workers.

Goldman Sachs' shipping companies throughout the United States, specifically in LA, cynically pit thousands of citizens and undocumented immigrants against each other -- for low wage jobs with unreliable hours -- Goldman Sachs and its shipping companies reap record profits off the backs of workers.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Anti-Wall Street protesters up and down the West Coast are joining an effort to blockade some of the nation’s busiest ports from Anchorage to San Diego.

Demonstrators are scheduled to gather at 5:30 a.m. to march on the Port of Oakland, which Occupy protesters successfully shut down in November. Marchers expect to descend even earlier on the sprawling port complex spanning Los Angeles and Long Beach as the work day begins. In Portland, Ore., the protest will get under way at 6 a.m.

We find ourselves at a turning point in the Occupy Movement. Progressives, liberals, populists, labor activists, peace activists, environmentalists ... all now have the country's attention.

We have a golden opportunity to unite and build a future that we've all been fighting for over the years. Our biggest obstacle is not the corporations or the government - it is ourselves.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves once again fighting each other. If we can't get along with our natural allies then how we will we ever build the true majority we need to change our world and build a just, sustainable society?

Oakland, California -- Today, rank-and-file workers from the ILWU and Teamsters, local union leaders, veterans, and occupy organizers explained plans for the upcoming West Coast Port Shut Down on December 12 called for by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly.

Community pickets and mass mobilizations to blockade the ports are being organized by Occupy movements in San Diego, LA, Oakland, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, and Houston.

Occupy Anchorage, Occupy Denver, and Occupy Wall Street are targeting Goldman Sachs and Walmart on the 12th. Solidarity actions are being planned as far away as in Japan.

Police have evicted Occupy protesters from Boston's Dewey Square, tearing down tents and arresting about 40 people. The raid brought to an end a 10-week demonstration spawned by the Wall Street occupation in New York.

Police moved in at about 5am and the operation lasted less than an hour. A police spokeswoman said the protesters were "very accommodating". Two dozen demonstrators linked arms and sat down in protest before the arrests began. The arrests were for trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Many of the individuals who were swept up by last week's LAPD raid on the Occupy LA encampment at Los Angeles City Hall were arrested even as they attempted to disperse in accordance with police directives, according to testimonials from some who were detained in the early morning hours of November 30th and held on misdemeanor charges for days after.

Their videotaped testimonials [some of which are posted below] both corroborate and reinforce the excessive force and post-arrest abuse charges detailed in our previous article on the Occupy LA raid, in which detainees charged that they were hand-cuffed behind their backs and left to languish inside L.A. County Sheriff's Department (LASD) buses for eight to nine hours without access to food, water, medicine, or toilets as they were left to urinate on themselves in their seats.

"If this is the revolution, this is our Valley Forge," said a doughy, middle-aged man with frazzled long brown hair.

I was shivering when we spoke at 7:30 a.m. Thursday morning - as I had been shivering for the seven previous hours. Arriving about midnight on Wednesday, I'd missed the day of cold rain that had left the Occupy DC camp somewhere between damp and drenched. Without a sleeping bag or pad (both lost in a police action a few days earlier) and in 35-degree weather, I settled into a soggy upholstered chair under a mostly dry blanket. The loose weave welcomed the wind that whipped through our flimsy yurt on the barren granite and marble of Freedom Plaza along Pennsylvania Avenue..

BOSTON — A diminished Occupy Boston encampment held its ground early Friday after police decided not to immediately enforce a midnight deadline Mayor Thomas Menino had set for them to leave a city square.

Two protesters were arrested after police said they moved a tent into a street and refused to move, blocking traffic. But there were no other serious confrontations between the demonstrators and supporters who gathered at the site as the deadline loomed.

Boston police Supt. William Evans told protesters that even though Menino set the deadline, he did not specify when the camp would be shut down.

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